Sardine, the leading AI risk platform for fraud, compliance, and credit underwriting, announced a $70 million Series C funding round, bringing the total capital raised to $145 million. The funding will allow company to expand its AI risk platform with a suite of intelligent agents designed to streamline fraud and compliance operations, reduce manual workloads, and cut costs for financial institutions.
Last year, scammers stole over $1 trillion globally. Deepfakes have made synthetic identities nearly indistinguishable from real ones. Social engineering attacks have become industrial-scale operations globally. Meanwhile, compliance costs now consume 10-20% of operational budgets for many financial services companies.
The tools to fight these threats haven’t kept pace. Legacy systems generate overwhelming alert volumes. Fraud teams are drowning in manual reviews. Compliance requirements grow more complex by the day. And real-time payments mean there are only milliseconds to detect threats before money moves.
Consider a typical fraud or compliance alert. What seems simple – verifying a user’s identity or validating a transaction – often requires 30+ minutes of manual investigation. Analysts piece together transaction histories, map relationship networks, verify location data, and cross-reference multiple systems. Multiply this by hundreds of alerts per day, and the backlog becomes impossible.
„Today, we are announcing our $70M Series C funding round led by Activant Capital, bringing our total raised to $145M. Most importantly, we’re sharing our vision for rebuilding trust in financial services through AI.” – said Soups Ranjan – CEO and co-founder of Sardine.
„The next phase of Sardine focuses on AI agents that augment human risk teams. Today, we’re announcing four new agents. Critically: All agent decisions are fully explainable, with clear audit trails showing exactly why each choice was made.” – he added.
Introducing AI agents for risk teams
KYC Agent
Automates the trickiest parts of onboarding – name mismatches across cultures, inconsistent date formats, and document verification challenges. Most banks and fintechs rely on documentary KYC (Drivers License, Passport, National ID card) as supplementary evidence when SSN checks fail during onboarding. Even after a document is uploaded, multiple checks are still required, such as verifying that the name on the document matches the one provided during onboarding.
Instead of forcing good customers to wait in review queues, Sardine KYC agent resolves edge cases automatically while maintaining compliance (with human oversight).
„We are achieving 88% auto resolution rates with our KYC agent thereby cutting down onboarding times and consequently also recovering potentially lost revenues.” – according to the company.
Sanctions Screening Agent
Helps teams efficiently review sanctions, politically exposed persons (PEP), and adverse media alerts. It learns your standard operating procedures (SOP), provides detailed audit logs, and enables compliance teams to validate decisions efficiently.
While building this Agent, Sardine said it has proactively engaged with regulators and examiners. „And while we could fully automate the approve/decline of a sanctions alert or negative news alert. Instead, our Agent proposes a decision that a human analyst can accept/reject. This allows us to correlate and benchmark accuracy of the Agent.” – the company explained.
To regulators, this level of transparency is critical so they can become more comfortable with AI Agents in what is the most critical part of customer due diligence. In particular, the cost of a false negative (sanctioned individual being approved) is disproportionately higher compared to false positives.
Merchant Risk Agent
A decade ago, there were thousands of sellers. Now, with innovations like “Tap to Pay,” anyone can accept card payments, and we are quickly moving toward a world with billions of sellers.
The old way of doing KYB was not built for this. PSPs and merchant acquirers designed their systems for a much smaller scale, and that model needs to evolve.
Sardine said that their Merchant Risk Agent pulls data from multiple sources to determine a merchant’s “True Industry” and “True MCC” and continuously monitors for changes as well. Fraudulent merchants often register with a low-risk MCC from Visa or Mastercard, only to later switch to a high-risk category to sell restricted goods like firearms.
The Agent also summarizes complaints. Are they shipping on time? Are they issuing refunds properly? It connects this data with transaction activity to catch signs of transaction laundering and collusion fraud, such as merchants swiping thousands of stolen cards to siphon funds.
Disputes Agent
Handles the entire chargeback and dispute process, from gathering data to preparing evidence packages. It formats submissions to match processor requirements and files them automatically, reducing manual work and improving win rates.
Several of Sardine customers have been able to automatically submit evidence packages to the card processors and schemes, cutting down time per evidence from 30+ minutes to 0. And to top it all, they see even higher chargeback win rates as there’s less room for human error.
Soups Ranjan concludes: „Our AI agents are in production today, delivering 4X ROI and unlocking millions in previously lost revenue. And they’re just the beginning. (…) This funding will accelerate our mission to rebuild trust in financial services. We’re expanding our enterprise capabilities, growing globally, and advancing our AI agent platform.„
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
